A Study in Brilliance

i had plans to regale you with a witty tale and some brilliant insights into life's deeper matters, but alas.  all of my thoughts are gone. 

something about eating two bowls of soup and three servings of delicious focaccia just isn't conducive to coherent thought.  

and something about cleaning the kitchen, washing and drying dishes, mopping, and spending an hour (or two?) answering emails/sending youtube videos to my studious husband seems to have killed all of my creativity.  it's dead.  

but i do have a picture for you.  brace yourselves.

what is this crap, you say?  

shut your mouth. 

it's A Study in Brilliance.

you see, tesla has never liked to sleep.  ever.  he just knows (KNOWS) that fun things are happening outside his door and that he is being cruelly forced to endure the torture of going to bed while we live it up (presumably having dance parties and watching Kipper).

[when i was little, i was convinced that my parents made us go to bed early so they could stay up to eat cookies and watch movies.  true story.]

so it goes like this.  we put him to bed, he cries for a bit, and then spends the next while yelling under the door.  

"mommy!  mooooMYYY!  MOOOOMMMMYYYY!"

"Go to sleep, Tesla."

"Mommy!  Tesla out?  All done!"

"No, Tesla.  Go to bed."

"Daddy?  Where are you?  Tesla out?"

plus the usual excuses.

"Water?"

"Potty?"

"More blanket?"

"Bear?  Where are you?"

....you get the picture.

the only way i've been able to get around this is if, after putting him in his room, i immediately turn off all the lights and hide in my room in silence.  the dark + quiet + lack of evidence of fun-having means he'll usually give up within a few minutes of protesting and go to sleep.

however, sometimes i actually have to Get Stuff Done.  like the aforementioned dishes/mopping/cleaning/dinner making.  and making dinner in the dark hasn't yielded good results.  so far.  but i'm working on it. 

so today, when silas and i were finishing our dinner, he had an inspired idea.

you know how people put a blanket over their birdcage to fool the bird into thinking it's bedtime?

it totally works.